Free Kickstarter Course: Validating Your Idea

In honor of our new Kickstarter campaign launching next week, I Can’t Stop Tooting: A Love Story, we are bringing our much lauded Free Kickstarter Course to you fine people at The Business of Art.

This is a free seven day course that we run which shows people how to create, launch, and fund their projects. Over the next seven weeks we will be showing you exactly how to have success on Kickstarter

Let’s get down to it. Our first lesson is validating an idea, the initial step in any campaign.

Validating an idea is an essential component of any Kickstarter campaign, as it will tell you exactly how big your market is, and whether there is rabid interest, mild interest, or no interest in your product.

I always start my validation tests at Google, by typing in several keywords into the search engine and seeing how many results pop up. Google will tell you the amount of terms related to your search. The higher, the better.

You can also run this search by going to the Google Adwords Keyword Planner, and typing in your search terms to get an idea of how active and popular your search terms are with people around the world.

Then I head over to Amazon and check the rankings of products. Again, I type in some similar search terms to what I’m trying to create. Then, I click on the most popular products and see their popularity index on Amazon as a whole.

After that, I’ll know exactly how popular the product is, how likely I am to find an audience, and roughly how much I can expect to raise from on Kickstarter.

Finally, I will run similar searches on Kickstarter and Indiegogo to see what hot topics there are in my category.

By doing this very quick search at the beginning, I will see if somebody has already created my idea. If so, I would abandon it in most cases.

None of the above are guarantees though. Just because there are no searches on Amazon or Google that return what you are trying to create, it’s not necessarily a bust. It just means you’ll have a longer row to hoe.

That’s it for this episode. Join us next week when we talk about Finding your Ideal Market and Building Your Audience.

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